NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
Imo the fediverse should not try to compete with the big commercial networks on their terms. It will be much healthier when it grows slow and steady with people who want to be here because it is the fediverse. A place of freedom and lack of controlling evil players who will use your data to control your behavior (to get more ad revenue or worse, to make you act against your best interests, such as happened on facebook with Cambridge Analytica).
We’re not gonna win from big dollars and vested interests. Let’s not play their game. Let them play their game and let us be a safe haven for anyone who is done with being a pawn in that game.
The fediverse is already a really nice place to be. You don’t need 100s of millions of users to have the network effect that creates a successful platform. We’ve already reached that critical mass.